Nokia confirms Samsung phone GUI win

Stinker challenge

Nokia has confirmed that handset rival Samsung will incorporate the Series 60 GUI and software stacks into future smartphones - five months after The Registerexclusively brought you the news.

Samsung became the first licensee for Series 60, and since then Siemens and Matsushita, which markets phones under the Panasonic brand, have also climbed on board. Samsung executives confirmed that it had thus become a Symbian licensee a few days later at the CeBIT show. A Nokia spokesperson told us that the contract had only been finalized over the summer.

Nokia's aggressive policy of licensing its crown jewels to rivals is intended to snuff out the challenge from Microsoft's Stinger smartphone platform. However Stinker, as it's become known, seems to be doing the job quite nicely without any intervention.

Samsung, like most vendors, is platform-agnostic, and the biggest licensee for Stinker: two weeks ago pictures of its SCH-I600 were disclosed in a regulatory filing submitted to the FTC.

The first Series 60-based phone, Nokia's own 7650 [review], began shipping in volume this summer. ®